The Gathering Dark: An Anthology of Folk Horror

by Tori Bovalino

All the things waiting for me to deal with them, waiting sullen and restless and resentful, are just going to have to keep on waiting.

How much can you give to a place before it swallows you whole?

Because I’m not content with one small corner of the world being all that I’ll ever see. Because it is an ambitious person’s nature to flock to where the world’s beating pulse is. Because there should be no harm in admitting that the world’s pulse is certainly not here, but I haven’t once been able to say that aloud without the people around me thinking I’m looking down on them, and perhaps—God, deep down perhaps I am, but why must I be punished for wanting more—

In hypothetical lunchtime conversations, rehashing movies and true crime documentaries, we always say we’ll fight back. That it’s weak and foolish to let yourself be bested, to let yourself be killed. As if it’s the victim’s idea to become a victim.

Something that plucked at all the bad feelings in your chest—your anger, your fear, your selfishness—and drew them out, played them like a violin.

They were so afraid of change, so afraid of becoming new people, they’d shackled each other to the corpses of who they’d been before.

And wasn’t that the worst part, every time? How the love and the caring stayed, even as everything around it rotted?

Monsters are made, angry girl. They aren’t born. I was like you once. My anger imprinted on the world, knit me into it once I passed from humanity and into something different.”

Life is too fragile to get attached to. One day you’re there, and the next, you’re not.

We all know that in some places, the dead don’t stay dead.

At the end of it all, we’re just two girls kneeling in the wreckage of our love.

I didn’t know why it hurt so much, why I was still so angry. It could have been worse, it could’ve been far worse, it’d been nothing I hadn’t done to myself, so why was it so hard to just let it go?

the only thing I’d ever known before was wanting someone. Not anyone specific. Just … someone. Who agreed that pineapple didn’t belong on pizza, or who wasn’t afraid to walk up next to me in a crowded room, put their arm around my shoulders, and let everyone know that I was the one they chose. I was the one who mattered.

The particulars of the someone weren’t important—I’d always wanted the person, rather than what they looked like. Who they were. What they had. Or didn’t have.

Love wasn’t supposed to make you so nauseous that you couldn’t eat. It wasn’t supposed to leave you feeling empty. Constantly worried that you said or did the wrong thing. That you weren’t enough, and never would be. Love wouldn’t send you into a dark tunnel without a flashlight.

It was impossible to keep something that never intended to stay. No. It was more than impossible. It was exhausting. Heartbreaking. The kind of thing that tore you to shreds, only to hastily put you back together, with no regard to where the pieces were being placed. It was a painful process. A punishment.

Sometimes we try our best to avoid bad people and heartbreaking situations, but the bad people and the heartbreak come anyway.